Authorities are trying to determine whether the pilot of a small plane that crashed in the Florida Panhandle Sunday night bailed out in the skies over Shelby County, according to a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration in Atlanta.

A military aircraft that flew alongside the plane saw that the door to the aircraft was open, said FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen.

CNN is reporting that the pilot may have faked the emergency and parachuted into Shelby County.

"All indications now are that he made some type of false emergency call [and] abandoned the plane by parachute," CNN quoted Sgt. Scott Haines of the Santa Rosa County, Florida, Sheriff's Office.

Haines told CNN the pilot checked into a hotel in the Harpersville, in Shelby County, under a false name but was gone when investigators arrived there this morning.

CNN identified the pilot as Marcus Schrenker, 38, from Indiana.

CNN'S report says:

Santa Rosa County Sheriff's Office got a call at 2:26 a.m. from the Childersburg Police Department in Alabama saying that a white male, identified as Schrenker by his Indiana driver's license, approached a Childersburg officer at a store.

Schrenker, who was wet from the knees down and had no injuries, told the officer that he had been in a canoeing accident with friends, the Santa Rosa Sheriff's Office said in a news release. Schrenker had goggles that looked like they were made for "flying," according to the release.

The pilot reported hitting turbulence over Huntsville at about 7:30 Sunday night, Bergen said. Then, he reported the windshield of the eight-passenger Piper Malibu he was flying had broken out. The pilot said he was bleeding, Bergen said.

The pilot lost contact, Bergen said. The plane flew, apparently on autopilot, across Alabama from north to south and into northwest Florida. It crashed at 9:15 p.m. near Naval Air Station Whiting Field near Milton, in Santa Rosa County, Bergen said.

Bergen said the Shelby County Sheriff's Office and Harpersville police are searching for the pilot. A secretary for Shelby County sheriff's office spokesman Capt. Ken Burchfield this morning said the Childersburg Police Department is the lead agency in the case.